Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize
discovermagazine.com
discovermagazine.com
I was surprised at the speed of the processing: simple thoughts like "bike" would trigger an enormously long chain of associations and thoughts that would go all the way back to my childhood, and I would vividly recall pictures of my first bike, but even now when I try to think of it I have trouble recalling such vivid memories.
I'm not quite sure whether the LSD caused me to think more about things, or whether it simply removed a filter that otherwise would exist without the drug. Either way, I walked away from that trip thinking, "there's so much more going on up there than I realize."
even now when I try to think of it I have trouble
recalling such vivid memories.
I have zero experience in this field and no education in related disciplines (other than CS :) ).
A theory about experiences such as from dreams - that it might feel like memory recall but actually be caused by stuff being written directly to the recall system at the time of recall.
By way of analogy, you used to be able to buy devices that plugged into floppy drives, and wrote magnetic signal directly to the reader head, without there being any actual movement or a real disk in there.
Continuing this (still entirely speculative) theory, after we wake up, a whole lot of internal correction rebuilds our knowledge map. This could explain why our memory of dreams fades as we wake up - that stuff we experienced wasn't a genuine experience and our brain has ways of knowing and chucking the junk.
Alcohol puts some parts of your brain to sleep. Too much alcohol eventually starts killing brain neurons. LSD obviously causes some temporary changes in your brain.
The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.
And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.
Huh? "Subtle visual cues" that seemingly cannot be described, but can somehow be taught and passed on? I call bs.
Just googled it, here's the technique:
Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess.
I think another factor is almost certainly sound. The study I just cited dealt with photographs, but the plane watchers in the story would also have been able to hear the sounds of the planes. There are certain models of aircraft I can identify by the sounds of their engines alone because I have been around (or in) them so much. However, to most people they just sound like "jet noise" or "prop noise." Even though I can tell the difference, I would have a hard time explaining it because the vocabulary we have for describing sounds is not nearly as complete as the vocabulary we have for describing images (or at least my vocabulary is that way).
1: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/...
I'm still on the fence. Years ago I rented a room in my house to an immigrant from South Korea who got his work visa (and later his green card) because he could sex chickens and the local farmers couldn't get anybody local who knew how to do it. He got great pay, and relatively easy work hours since as the taskers became tired, their error rate went up. He worked with several other sexers who were all either from South Korea or Japan.
He could never quite explain how he did it, but he did teach a few Americans at the poultry plant how to do it via the technique described in the article before moving on to some different trades.
I believe the operator really doesn't know how he parses the information, and at these speed and error rates it must be something more than seeing bumps or not.
Could it be that this method would not be efficient, economical?
I remember an anecdotal story of how, in the old days, the great players of chess could tell you if the move just made was good or not but could not explain why. They somehow just knew.
When I want to understand a complex topic (e.g. back end development), I simply read every now and then articles and posts beyond my comprehension. And I do it quickly. When I commit to learn the topic, I usually find that 90% of the work is already done. Is really like somebody else was processing all the information.
I think that this is a very powerful process to boost knowledge. But it also has significative drawbacks. It tend to be a far less social person when I saturate my subconscious. I also noticed, that my brain tends to discard little details. For example sometimes I can't remember what I eat at lunch.
AS a side note, I also noticed that I can bump myself out this learning mode if I don't touch a computer for the whole day. I do it on saturdays and sundays and start the next week feeling more productive. On the other hand if I don't do it for a couple of weeks I tend to feel exhausted.
Anybody else has similar experiences? Tips to share?
I'm doing this automatically, without thinking about it, some time ago I've discovered this, when at 2nd reading of the book I've stumbled at a fragment that made my understanding of the whole story "reevaluate" :) Somehow I've missed the fragment before, and the whole book made less sense.
I've tried to understand how my brain decides what to skip, and the heuristic is sth like this - read all things that starts with "-" (dialogs are the most important), beginning of the paragraphs, and the places that have many whitespaces, skip most of the other text, if you don't know what you are reading about - think for a while to deduce what's going on, if you don't know - go back and read more. That's not the whole heuristic, but that's what I can easily notice.
Especially the skill to "wait for a few pages to see if something you don't know yet will explain by itself, or can be deduced from what you know" is usefull. That way I read faster than most people I know, and I'm good at quickly learning material for exams (but without using the information I quickly forget what I've read. I even don't remember sometimes if I've read this book at all - mostly happens with fantasy books - they are all similiar :) ).
I'm also very bad at remembering names of real people and book heroes. I remember them "functionaly" - the one that is the uncle of the bad guy, etc.
I call this 'reading for the plot'.
I also suffer from the same issue with remembering names. I wonder if the two phenomena are related.
I sometimes wonder about where the value of reading (fiction) comes from: is it the plot and trying to figure things out before they are explicitly explained? The little details? The long, lyrical passages? The act of reading itself? Something else? I'm curious what your thoughts on this are.
Emotionally, it's certainly enough to get attached to characters, which is the point. But the way my brain likes to read (it's not a conscious decision, just the way I do it), is to skip a lot of the description, and get to the interesting bits (dialog, action scenes, etc).
I certainly miss out some subtleties, but if you and I read the same book we could have a meaningful discussion about it, probably without you realizing that I likely read it in half the time and only paid attention to about 80% of the content.
Here is a long story if you want to know how I discovered this method.
When I was young (12 year old), I usually go to school to learn things. The process is simple. You start from the basics and you build upon this knowledge. In the end of the trimester, you accumulate knowledge which is pretty much limited to what teachers taught you. This is because you (I) don't go and read books or articles.
This knowledge quickly evaporates. I usually find myself learning and learning the same stuff again and reviewing it every-time I have an exam. It went like that and I succeeded every year.
When I was 17, I noticed an interesting fact: I'm quite good at programming. I have been doing it since 10 and reading anything that just comes in my way. Article about programming? Just read and think about it, discuss it on communities, read comments and contribute to coding forums.
Why I'm better/different than the other guys? Simply: I have a wider and deeper knowledge. When I read a programming book about Ruby On Rails, it doesn't take 30 days to write my first program. I can do it from the first hour. This is because I already know how to install a program, what a server is, what a HTTP request is, and have a good coding knowledge.
What you are doing is exactly this: You are broadening your spectrum of knowledge about that particular topic so when you read the said book, you get the gist out of it quickly and easily. No one/thing is doing the work for you, you are just using a different method.
For me, and the reason why I use this is because the book/resources are quite boring to read. They don't also cover lot of topics that I don't know about and reading them will make the topic feel like quite difficult to master and understand.
I think a lot of programmers here learned programming the same way too. Sitting in front of a compiler/interpreter, edit the code, try to compile and run the program. We will get a "yes or no", and if no, we repeat the procedure. Today, we can program without thinking consciously "will this code compile"; We just write it and a lot of the time, it compiles just fine. If we were to teach someone having trouble with programming however, the most useful advice we have is usually "You just need to spend more time with it".
I read about a year back that a person's gait can be used for biometric identification (something which I wondered about because its seems to be the primary way I recognize people). The article linked to a pdf that showed an attempt at designing a system that recognized people from their gait. It was incredibly difficult and complicated because you needed a lot of sensors to measure, bunch of high level math to process and prone to failure because the gait would change if you were carrying a heavy bag, walking on a slippery floor etc. Yet, the brain is capable of doing all this and adjust to situations all in a fraction of a second. It was the first time that I was seriously blown away by how incredible the brain is.
I believe I've had this experience with some computer games - like tetris - where at some point it is too fast to really see what is going on despite the fact that you are still playing correctly.
In the near future I guess we will have to live with 60fps, which still is quite good, since that's becoming the defacto standard refresh rate of tvs and monitors. But it's quite sad to see newer games trying to lower the frame rate just for more visual effects, Battlefield 3 for example only runs in 30FPS on consoles T_T
One consulting project involved 900 modules in 200 directories. I opened modules and skimmed through, and the bugs were just everywhere. (No, not false-positives. Once flagged, you can read carefully and prove the bug). I abandoned that source base as unredeemable and wrote a simple 10-module driver to replace it. (The customer rejected it, couldn't believe I could be right. They hired somebody else, the product was cancelled and recalled 9 months later).
For a really good explanation of the differences and the problems caused, read Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions. Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society also discusses this, as do other books and essays, but Sowell's is more readable and his examples are closer to contemporary (it was written in the late 1970s and published in 1981).
Recently, I took a three-day trip and wanted to zone out on a game, so I started playing a card game called 'spider solitaire', based on a friend's suggestion.
I had never played it before, and I found it to be very challenging with all the difficulty settings set to the maximum. And, at that difficulty level, I would quickly lose every attempt, and it was very frustrating.
But, by the third day, I found that I suddenly winning 15-20% of my attempts. Not statistical evidence by any means, but I was playing enough to definitely see a drastic change in success.
The funny thing was that I had no idea why I was suddenly winning. I didn't consciously change my playing methods. In fact, I 'felt' like I was just moving the cards around the same as I was before.
The story about the judge is great evidence of this. He knows what an injury is, and all his senses tell him he is injured, but somehow he still can't know that he is injured. Or at least, he behaves like he can't know it. The conscious/unconscious model of the mind just can't reconcile this.
We need a better resolution picture of "Conscious" and "Unconscious".
I'd be interested to hear if "muscle memory" like this is used in machine learning/AI type situations for things such as evaluating and tuning randomly created classifiers to identify objects, or respond to stimuli. If so, we could extract those "memories" from the computer to identify exactly what it ends up using to classify different objects, to show us the subtle differences.
I wonder where programming falls on this?